Author Archives for Institute for InterGroup Understanding

The biggest single public health deficit and failure in America today is the fact that almost no parents of newborn children have been told or taught that they can improve their child’s learning abilities significantly by exercising their baby’s brain in the first three years of life. The basic biological science on that issue is absolutely clear — and almost no one is sharing that...

We have just done some work at the Institute for InterGroup Understanding we believe could actually help change the lives of large numbers of children for the better. We have just built and offered the world a new, easy to use Three Key Years website, which focuses entirely on helping parents and families from all groups build better lives for children by doing the right...

Governor Jerry Brown has just re-appointed me to serve for four more years on the First Five Commission for Children and Families for the State of California. I have been honored to Chair that Commission for the past four years, and I love the work that the Commission does and is doing. Thank you, Governor Brown. The people of California created First Five more than a...

The United States just elected a new President. The election process and the election results were exactly aligned with the most problematic “Us/Them” instinctive behavior chapters of the Primal Pathways, Peace in Our Time, Cusp of Chaos, and The Art of InterGroup Peace books. We had one of the most contentious and divisive campaigns in the history of our election process. We have people who...

We have massive learning gaps between groups of children in far too many schools in our country today. Efforts to close those gaps over the past two decades have very consistently failed. We have an economic reality where minority Americans have an average net worth that is less than 30 percent of the average net worth for White Americans. Unemployment levels are far higher for...

Sixty percent of African American males in this country who drop out of school end up in jail. The recidivism rate for those prisoners is nearly 80 percent. Those numbers are horrible. They result in damaging life trajectories for far too many. We can change those trajectories — but to change them, we need to make those changes for people in the very first weeks, months,...

The book, The Art of InterGroup Peace, has just been re-issued as a second edition. The new edition deals more directly with issues and topics like Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, the shootings in Paris and Brussels, and the immigration and alienation backlashes happening in Europe and the Middle East. The new edition has a clearer chapter on how to use the six key alignment triggers...

We need to understand our basic sets of intergroup instincts in order to create Peace in our conflicted settings. There are more than 200 ethnic conflicts in the world today. Instead of being a world where nations go to war with other nations, we are now a world where people inside nations fight other people in those nations. Instinctive behaviors shape all of those conflicts....

Europe is awash in intergroup conflict. Every country in Europe is facing significant intergroup issues — and those countries are all having a hard time figuring out how to deal with those issues. Europe was ethnically pure for centuries. French people lived in France. Germans lived in Germany. Swedes lived in Sweden. Those countries are all highly tribal. That has been true for centuries. In...

Earlier today, I was interviewed on the Dr. Oz television show about the need for very young children to have books read to them, and I was interviewed about my own book, Three Key Years. Three Key Years explains why we need to talk and read to infants, toddlers, and very young children so they are all learning ready when they get to school. The studio audience...